AI Tools · 6 min read
16,811 Reverse-Engineered Tools in One Free List (and the 5 Worth Installing First)
Someone built a free, searchable list of every open-source tool that exists because a person cracked open something closed. Here are the five to try first, and the one command that gives the whole list to Claude.
Came from the reel?
Here is the list, the five tools from the video, and the one command that gives the whole index to Claude.
Open the list on GitHub"Key Takeaways"
- awesome-reverse-engineered is a free index of 16,811 open-source tools that exist because someone reverse-engineered a closed app, device, file format or game.
- It refreshes every night, and every entry has a health label so you can skip abandoned projects.
- The five worth trying first: Sunshine + Moonlight, Vaultwarden, openpilot, FFmpeg and LibrePods.
- It also ships as a skill for Claude Code, so your agent checks the list before building an integration from scratch.
- Stick to tools for your own devices and accounts, and skip anything that breaks a service's terms.
Summarize this article with
Someone built a searchable list of every open-source tool that exists because a person cracked open something closed.
Apps, APIs, smart devices, file formats, games, even AI products. 16,811 of them, with 11.2 million GitHub stars between them, and the list updates itself every night.
Its tagline says it all: don't reverse engineer it twice. Before you spend a weekend decoding a smart plug or an app's private API, there is a good chance someone already did it and left the result in a repo nobody links to.
What's inside
| Category | Projects |
|---|---|
| Game decompilations and reimplementations | 6,073 |
| Devices, IoT and hardware | 3,059 |
| Reverse-engineering tools (Ghidra, jadx and more) | 1,031 |
| Unofficial web and app API clients | 908 |
| AI tools and LLM clients | 740 |
| Online service revivals | 639 |
Every entry carries a health label (active, slowing down, dormant or archived). The code is MIT-licensed and the data is CC0, so you can reuse the index itself however you like. You can browse it on GitHub or on the search site at alexgaoth.github.io/awesome-reverse-engineered.
1. Sunshine + Moonlight: stream your PC games to your phone
Sunshine is a self-hosted game-streaming host that runs on your PC. Moonlight is the app that plays the stream on your phone, tablet or another computer.
Together they do what NVIDIA GameStream used to do, without tying you to one brand of graphics card. Sunshine has 42.6k stars on GitHub (LizardByte/Sunshine), Moonlight 19.2k.
2. Vaultwarden: your own password server
An unofficial server that speaks the Bitwarden protocol, written in Rust and light enough for a small home server.
You keep using the official Bitwarden apps and browser extensions. Your vault simply lives on hardware you control. 69.6k stars (dani-garcia/vaultwarden).
3. openpilot: driver assistance for 300+ car models
From comma.ai. It upgrades the driver assistance on more than 300 supported car models with adaptive cruise control and lane centering, running on comma's own device.
It is driver assistance, not self-driving. You stay responsible for the car. 64k stars (commaai/openpilot).
4. FFmpeg: the engine under a huge amount of video software
FFmpeg reads and writes almost every audio and video format there is, including proprietary formats their makers never documented.
If you have ever converted, trimmed or compressed a video with a free tool, FFmpeg was very likely doing the work underneath. 65.6k stars (FFmpeg/FFmpeg).
5. LibrePods: AirPods features on Android
LibrePods implements the private protocol AirPods use with Apple devices. Android and Linux users get noise-control switching, ear detection, battery levels, conversational awareness and head gestures.
30.4k stars (librepods-org/librepods).
Before you install LibrePods
Some features need root on certain phones, so check the README for your device first.
librepods.org is not the project's official site. The developer warns about it in the README. Download from the GitHub repo only.
The graveyard: products their makers killed
- Spotify bricked its Car Thing in 2024. DeskThing turns it into a desk display for Discord, weather, macros and more.
- Google ended app support for first and second-generation Nest Learning Thermostats in 2025. NoLongerEvil Thermostat brings them back with new firmware.
- Fitbit shut down Pebble's servers in 2018. The community app Cobble keeps Pebble watches working.
The list has a whole page for these, called Resurrected: 130 products kept alive by people who reverse-engineered them. If a company stopped supporting something you own, check that page before you throw it away.
Give the whole list to Claude
The list ships as a skill. When a task needs to talk to something with no official API, your agent searches the index, ranks results by stars, activity and license, reads the README and picks a tool, instead of writing one from scratch.
Run this in your terminal to add it to Claude Code:
npx skills add alexgaoth/awesome-reverse-engineered
Other ways to install it
- As a Claude Code plugin: /plugin install reverse-engineered --marketplace alexgaoth/awesome-reverse-engineered
- As a connector for Claude Desktop, Cursor and other apps that support MCP (the standard way to plug tools into AI apps): claude mcp add reverse-engineered -- uvx --from "git+https://github.com/alexgaoth/awesome-reverse-engineered#subdirectory=mcp" reverse-engineered-mcp
- A real example from the README: ask your agent to control a Tuya smart plug locally, and it finds make-all/tuya-local (3.6k stars), a Home Assistant integration that already does it.
Use it sensibly
- Your devices, your accounts. Tools that make hardware you own work better, or revive products you bought, are the safest ground.
- Skip anything that breaks a service's terms. The list also includes proxies that give free access to paid AI models and archives of leaked system prompts. Using those can get your accounts banned.
- Check the license and the health label before you depend on a project. An archived repo won't get security fixes.
- Download from the official repo. Popular projects attract fake sites, as LibrePods shows.
Quick questions
Is it free?
Yes. The list is MIT (code) and CC0 (data), and every project in it is open source under its own license.
How often is it updated?
Every night, by an automated job on GitHub. The numbers in this post were checked on October 24, 2026.
Do I need to code to use these tools?
For Vaultwarden, Sunshine and LibrePods, no. Follow each README's install steps. For the skill, you need Claude Code or another agent that supports skills.
Can I add a project?
Yes. The README explains how. The rule is that the project must exist because someone reverse-engineered something closed.
The Chai Takeaway
Next time you think "there must be an API for this", search the list before you open a packet sniffer. Someone has probably already done the hard part.
Search the list